Ukrainian visiting scholar escapes war to study human rights

For Serhii Nadobko, a Ukrainian visiting scholar at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, the study of human rights is deeply personal.

After fleeing from war-torn Kharkiv, Nadobko joins the Faculty through the Faculty’s support of the Disrupted Ukrainian Scholars and Students initiative. The U of A initiative provides opportunities for scholars and students whose lives have been impacted by Russia's escalated invasion of Ukraine.

“When war began my life was upside down, and that morning at five a.m., it started with air bombs, airplanes and a lot of tanks who try to attack my native city and destroyed all of them,” said Nadobko, who arrived in Edmonton in February and was reunited with his wife and daughter who had arrived in Canada months earlier.

During his five month term as a visiting scholar, he plans to pursue research on Ukrainian human rights. His research is motivated by witnessing the war in his country.

“In the era of the declaration of democratic rights and freedoms of human rights, it is difficult to imagine that a war is possible in the heart of Europe, which is the homeland for fundamental basis of the declaration of legal ideas by many world-famous thinkers,” said Nadobko.

While he is grateful that he and his family are now safe, the conflict remains etched in Nadobko’s mind.

“Recalling my first night in Edmonton, I remember how I woke up at night to the sound of a siren and began to take out my phone in search of a map of aerial alarms to see in which city a missile attack was taking place,” said Nadobko. “It was not an alarm. It was just the sounds of a fire truck rushing to a call in one of the areas of Edmonton.”

“Many times, I had to duck while seeing the plane in the sky of Edmonton, doing it instinctively and thinking that it is preparing to drop the bombs.”

Before the war, Nadobko served as dean of the Faculty of Audio-Visual Arts and Distance Learning in Kharkiv. He has served as head of legal services at Kharkiv State Academy Design and Art, where he also worked as an associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities.

He holds a PhD in law from VN Karazin Kharkiv National University with a focus on administrative law and process, financial law and information law. His dissertation examined the administrative responsibility for violating the law in the banking industry.

Nadobko is also an expert in anti-discrimination policy. His expertise was called upon by the Ministry of Education and Science to serve on a commission examining educational materials and manuals for discrimination.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and recognitions from his institution, as well as the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, local governments and other organizations.

Nadobko’s new research while at the Faculty of Law includes the methods for improving the legal guarantees surrounding human rights in Ukraine, the administrative regulators of human rights and constitutional human rights under martial law.

He hopes to write and publish articles on his latest work during his time with the Faculty.